Science Fiction and Fantasy

As a highly visual writer, Ray Bradbury’s works have frequently been adapted for film and television. One of the most stylized and haunting dramatizations is François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. For this fifth volume of The New Ray Bradbury Review, guest editor Phil Nichols brings together essays and articles that reflect upon Bradbury’s classic novel and Truffaut’s enduring low-tech science fiction film, fifty years after its release.

Renowned fantasy illustrator James A. Owen presents fifteen intricate and imaginative line drawings inspired by the works of Oxford’s famous Inklings and Diana Glyer’s fascinating Bandersnatch.

Printed on heavy stock on one side only, each drawing is suitable for markers, fine-tipped pens, and colored pencils. Color your way through The Eagle and Child pub, along the banks of the Isis, beneath the spires of Magdalene College—and find (and color!) the bandersnatch hidden in each picture.

Each previous The New Ray Bradbury Review, prepared and edited by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, examines the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and his legacy as one of the master storytellers of his time. The late Ray Bradbury’s metaphor-rich imagination led to a prolific and highly influential career spanning seven decades, but it also left a decades-long field of deferred fragmentary fictions and story ideas that would remain unfulfilled creations. For Number 4, William F. Touponce, founding editor emeritus of the Review, has gathered and introduced fascinating examples of story ideas, brief story openings and endings, and extended story openings that will forever remain dreams deferred.

Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant examines Donaldson’s first three novels in an attempt to define their place in the fantasy canon. The book begins with an extensive introduction to the fantasy genre in which W.A. Senior eloquently defends fantasy against charges of being mere escapism, or simply juvenile, and not warranting serious critical considerations.

In Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, the character Helen says of her children: “All their lives, ever since they’ve known anything, they’ve lived under the shadow of war—atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal.” The threat of nuclear annihilation was a constant source of dread during the Cold War, and in Under the Shadow, author David Seed examines how authors and filmmakers made repeated efforts in their work to imagine the unimaginable.

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed principally to study the impact of Bradbury’s writings on American culture and is the chief publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies—the archive of Bradbury’s writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Like its pioneering predecessor, the one- volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. While Bradbury’s effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed, there is no doubt about his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his admirers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of readers.

In the past, collections of Bradbury’s works have juxtaposed stories with no indication as to the different time periods in which they were written. Even the mid- and late-career collections that Bradbury himself compiled contained stories that were written much earlier—a situation that has given rise to misconceptions about the origins of the stories themselves. In this new edition, editors William F. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller present for the first time the stories of Ray Bradbury in the order in which they were written. Moreover, they use texts that reflect Bradbury’s earliest settled intention for each tale. By examining his relationships with his agent, editor, and publisher, Touponce and Eller’s textual commentaries document the transformation of the stories—and Bradbury’s creative understanding of genre fiction—from their original forms to the versions known and loved today.